ComputerSupported Cooperative Work CSCW

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Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)

• Thinking about groups

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Agenda

• Questions
• Project Part 4
• CSCW
• classification
• Groupware
• Grudins challenges

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Part 4

• Conduct Evaluation
• Report results
• Provide analysis
• Implications on design
• Reflections on evaluation plan

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Presentation

• 15 minutes each (including questions)
• Load slides onto swiki
• Motivation
• Requirements
• learning from users
• Design
• learning from prototyping
• possible demo
• Evaluation
• Conclusions
• QA

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CSCW

• Computer Supported Cooperative Work
• HCI connotations CSCW
• individual use
• psychology

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CSCW

• Computer Supported Cooperative Work
• Study of how people work together as a group and
  how technology affects this
• Support the social processes of work, often among
  geographically separated people

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Examples

• Recall multitasking paradigm shift
• The system became the medium, the moderator,
  rather than just a tool
• There are now many collaborations, like
• Scientists collaborating on a technical issue
• Authors editing a document together
• Programmers debugging a system concurrently
• Workers collaborating over a shared video
  conferencing application
• Buyers and sellers meeting on eBay

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The second C

• Group work not always cooperative or collaborative

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Groupware

• Software specifically designed
• to support group working
• with cooperative requirements in mind
• NOT just tools for communication
• Groupware can be classified by
• when and where the participants are working
• the function it performs for cooperative work
• Specific and difficult problems with groupware
  implementation

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4750 groupware projects
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The Time/Space Matrix

• Classify groupware by
• when the participants are working, at the same
  time or not
• where the participants are working, at the same
  place or not
• Common names for axes time synchronous/asynch
  ronous place co-located/remote

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Applied to traditional technology
differenttime
sametime
sameplace
face-to-faceconversation
post-it note
differentplace
letter
phone call
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Applied to computer technology
Time
Synchronous
Asynchronous
Co-located
Place
Remote
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A More-fleshed Out Taxonomy
A typical space/time matrix (after Baecker,
Grudin, Buxton, Greenberg, 1995, p.742)
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Styles of Systems

• Computer-mediated communication aids
• Meeting and decision support systems
• Shared applications and tools

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Computer-mediated Communication Aids

• Examples
• Email, Chats, MUDs, virtual worlds
• Desktop videoconferencing -- Examples
• CUSee-Me
• MS NetMeeting
• SGI InPerson

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Meeting and Decision Support Systems

• Examples
• Corporate decision-support conference room
• Provides ways of rationalizing decisions, voting,
  presenting cases, etc.
• Concurrency control is important
• Shared computer classroom/cluster
• Group discussion/design aid tools

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Shared Applications and Tools

• Examples
• Shared editors, design tools, etc.
• Want to avoid locking and allow multiple people
  to concurrently work on document
• Requires some form of contention resolution
• How do you show what others are doing?

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Social Issues

• People bring in different perspectives and views
  to a collaboration environment
• Goal of CSCW systems is often to establish some
  common ground and to facilitate understanding and
  interaction

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Turn Taking

• There are many subtle social conventions about
  turn taking in an interaction
• Personal space, closeness
• Eye contact
• Gestures
• Body language
• Conversation cues

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Geography, Position

• In group dynamics, the physical layout of
  individuals matters a lot
• Power positions

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Awareness

• What is happening?
• Who is there e.g. IM buddy list
• What has happened and why?

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Groupware implementation

• Often more complicated
• feedback and network delays
• architectures for groupware
• feedthrough and network traffic
• toolkits, robustness and scaling

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Feedback and network delays

• At least 2 network messages four context
  switches
• With protocols 4 or more network messages

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Types of architecture

• centralised single copy of application and data
• client-server simplest case
• master-slave special case of client-server
• server merged with one client
• replicated copy on each workstation
• also called peer-peer
• local feedback
• race conditions

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Feedthrough traffic

• Need to inform all other clients of changes
• Few networks support broadcast messages, so n
  participants ? n1 network messages!
• Solution increase granularity
• reduce frequency of feedback
• but poor feedthrough ? loss of shared context
• Trade-off timeliness vs. network traffic

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Evaluation

• Evaluating the usability and utility of CSCW
  tools is quite challenging
• Need more participants
• Logistically difficult
• Apples - oranges
• Often use field studies and ethnographic
  evaluations to assist

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Groupware Challenges (Grudin)

• Who does work vs. who gets benefit
• Critical mass
• prisoners dilemma

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More Grudin challenges

• Social, political, and motivational factors
• No standard procedures

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More Grudin challenges

• Infrequent features
• Groupware intuition

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More Grudin challenges

• Managing acceptance
• Evaluation
• longer, more complicated, less precise

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More on CSCW

• CS 7460 Collaborative Computing
• See Web

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Example

• TeamSpace a meeting capture and access system